Mr Lansley insisted that private medical clinics have a moral responsibility to shoulder the cost of corrective surgery for women who fear they have received faulty breast implants and not leave the NHS to pay for it.

The Health Secretary also warned private clinics that it would be “unacceptable” for them to charge women for information or treatment relating to PIP breast implants, which some companies say are at increased risk of rupturing.

Around 40,000 British women are thought to have received the implants, around 37,000 of them as cosmetic treatments through private clinics.

A UK Breast Implant Registry was established in 1993 on the recommendation of the Department of Health to track patients with implants and establish whether they were more likely to develop health problems. It closed because too few women wished to take part in the scheme.

A lack of a central database means it is not clear how many women in Britain have had breast implants or what the rupture rate of PIP implants is.

A member of the Government-commissioned panel investigating the matter yesterday said that there was now an overwhelming case for all the faulty implants to be removed irrespective of whether or not they had ruptured.

Some estimates have put the cost of removing faulty implants at £150 million.